Dear Editor.
The US is just the latest mighty power whose mission in Afghanistan ended in failure. Since the days of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, many have sought to conquer the territory now known as Afghanistan. The country has long been known as the “graveyard of empires”, evoking its reputation for thwarting the expansionist ambitions of occupiers from imperial Britain to Soviet Russia. The US has spent an estimated $1tn in the country since it invaded in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks, toppling the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban regime. Yet, two decades later, the Islamists are once again in power after an offensive that within weeks unraveled the republic the US tried to leave in its place. Afghanistan is “a graveyard for colonialist, or neocolonialist foreign powers that aim to rule”, said Romain Malejacq, a political scientist and author of Warlord Survival, about state building in Afghanistan. In his 2010 history of the country, anthropologist Thomas Barfield wrote that “Afghanistan got rid of foreign occupiers by making the country so ungovernable that they wanted to leave”. Yet, he lamented, this strategy eventually “came to haunt the Afghans themselves” as each conflict left state institutions weaker and ascendant groups more brutal. Imperial Britain viewed Afghanistan, a landlocked country, along the ancient Silk Road trade route, as a vital buffer between its Indian colony and Russia, fearing the Russians would use Afghanistan to attack its Empire in south Asia and – the ‘jewel in the crown’ – India.
The British moved first, invading in 1839 and installing a pliant local ruler. This ended in what historians’ dubbed Britain’s “greatest imperial disaster”. Britain was repeatedly thwarted in its attempts to add Afghanistan to its empire who forced a British retreat in 1842. Britain marched a force of nearly 20,000 out of Kabul only to be picked off by tribal forces along the way. A sole British survivor made it back. Britain continued trying to incorporate Afghanistan into its empire, fighting two more wars in 1878 and 1919, before ending its ambitions of having a barrier between imperial India and Russian ambitions of colonization in Asia. The Soviet invasion, 1979-89, to expand its “empire” became a battleground in the Cold War after a communist coup in 1978. The new regime’s brutality provoked fierce local resistance, with more uprisings prompting an invasion by Soviet Union troops the following year. With the backing of the US and Pakistan, loosely organised factions of local insurgents known as Mujahedeen waged jihad against the Soviets and the Afghan communists. Soviet army soldiers riding in armoured vehicles during the Soviet troop withdrawal from Kabul in 1988 Soviet troops were unable to defeat local insurgents who used guerrilla tactics against them. The ensuing civil war was devastating for Afghanistan. Yet the Soviets’ vast resources proved insufficient to crush the Mujahedeen, with their guerrilla tactics resulting in a painful and costly stalemate. One million Afghans were killed and another 4m displaced. “The Soviets came to the same conclusion that the British had reached a century earlier: the direct occupation of Afghanistan had a high cost for few benefits,” Barfield wrote. After the Soviets left, Mujahedeen factions turned on each other. Ultimately, this chaos gave rise to the Taliban — ethnic Pashtuns who vowed to impose their dogmatic interpretation of Islamist order on the war-weary population. The Taliban regime provoked international opprobrium for their cruelty — erasing women’s rights and meting out brutal punishment — while offering shelter to Islamist extremists. But harbouring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda ahead of 9/11 proved too much. Within a month of the Twin Tower attacks, the US began bombing the country, rallying local warlords to rout the Taliban on the battlefield ahead of a full-scale invasion. By December 2001 the Taliban had collapsed, fleeing alongside bin Laden to the mountains. President George W. Bush subsequently announced plans to reconstruct the country, while in 2003 his defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “major combat” was over.
But the Taliban’s insurgency only gained momentum in the years that followed, prompting President Barack Obama to increase the US military presence to more than 100,000 troops. Withdrawal plans were delayed, the Taliban gathering strength all the while. This boiled over into fierce violence under President Donald Trump, who agreed to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan in a February 2020 peace deal. President Joe Biden, mindful of domestic exhaustion at the so-called forever war, pressed ahead, announcing that the US would leave by the end of this month. The US had not even finished withdrawing before the Taliban over-ran all remaining resistance last week. Historians and political scientists will long debate how and where the US got it so wrong. And one argues that — like other powers before — the US mistakenly believed it could remake the country using force. “The whole point of this intervention was not to .build a state, a democracy. . . it was about counter-terrorism. The chaotic withdrawal of the present situation of US & NATO forces is a repeat of the 2 previous world powers failing to colonize a small isolated country of under 40 million. Of course we now have the question of what now.
Sincerely,
Peter Douglas